5 ways to improve digital customer experience
The transformation and digitization of customer experience
How we define good customer experience has evolved over the last few decades.
Before, this meant making eye contact with a customer as they walked through the store, smiling and greeting them, and making recommendations to potential buyers. It also included setting up the store to be visually appealing or creating posters and banners that people can walk by and remember.
But as customers grow more accustomed to purchasing things from tablets, smartphones, or PCs, customer experience has also begun to change, with businesses facing challenges interacting with customers that are shopping online.
With the transition into the digital age, even offline stores are beginning to see the need to adopt digital transformation within their business model to stay afloat and stay competitive.
But the biggest challenge that online businesses face, is standing out from others that are also flowing into the online digital space.
The importance of improving digital customer experience
It’s natural to feel detached from others when we’re not face to face.
Customers usually feel this way when making purchases online, making it difficult for them to sympathize with businesses. These customers also tend to be more difficult to please.
In order to capture their attention and keep them interested in your online store, digital customer experience is a must.
But the important question is, how do I build a strong relationship with someone behind a screen and create an experience that will help my brand stand out?
By implementing the following tips, you’ll be able to immediately improve the quality of your digital customer experience and be remembered by customers for it.
- Implement a live chat
- Start talking and be remembered
- Pay attention to the Voice of the Customer
- Utilize automations where it counts
- Think omnichannel for the entire end-to-end customer journey
Let’s look into the details.
1. Implement a live chat
Probably a huge part of digital customer experience is finding a way to connect with your customers.
Unless you own an offline store where you can interact with customers, you’ll need a way to communicate with the customers that come onto your online storefront.
If you haven’t done so already, we recommend that you install a live chat to your website.
Live chats are a great way to improve your digital customer experience as it gives customers a way to ask questions or get recommendations, instead of being left alone to make purchase decisions only based on the information that’s available on your site.
The great thing about live chat is that it also gives your business an opportunity to build relationships with customers, make further recommendations, and upsell to increase your revenue. It also give you the opportunity to inform customers of future releases or events that customers might miss from browsing your site on their own.
2. Start talking and be remembered
As customers have changed their shopping habits in the new digital age, businesses have also begun to shift in the way they handle customers.
A majority of online businesses have gotten comfortable adopting chatbots to handle most of their incoming inquiries from customers, limiting the amount of time spent directly interacting with customers.
No one can really blame them as technology is evolving faster than we can get used to them.
And with efficiency being a core concern for small and medium sized businesses with limited resources, utilizing a chatbot is a sensible choice.
But when everyone is doing the same thing and automating a majority of their CS and CX, it’s no surprise that the businesses that actually take the time to talk to customers, really stand out from the crowd.
Simply connecting with a real person goes a long way to improve digital customer experience and can help your business be remembered.
3. Pay attention to the Voice of the Customer
One of the biggest mistakes that small to medium sized business owners make is taking what customers say at face value, or ignoring them completely.
Customers have their own lingo, and it can often be hard to translate or understand, but the important thing is filtering out the distractions and understanding the logic behind what they’re telling you.
For example, if you keep receiving the same inquiries about details on a product — when you’ve already posted the information on your site — it could be an indication that the details on that particular product is not easy to find. You may need to rethink the design or layout of your site.
The Voice of the Customer is an extremely valuable resource, and some businesses even pay a lot of money just to get it.
It’s definitely worth the extra attention.
Using the feedback you get from customers is a great way — and quite possibly the fastest way — to discover the issues with your business that could be hindering your growth.
Finding those issues and resolving them is a big step towards improving the digital shopping experience for your customers, and they’ll also appreciate the fact that you take their feedback seriously.
4. Utilize automations where it counts
There are many cases where businesses spread their resources too thin.
Being eager to take on new projects to grow as quickly as possible is great, but if you try to grow too quickly without considering how to manage that growth, it could possibly bring your entire operation to a halt. This is what we would call “growing pains.”
Usually when this happens, the company begins to break down piece by piece needing time to recover. People quit on short notice, poor decisions are made, and staff that were once hard working and efficient — get burnt out from the chaos.
Customers get affected by this as a result, and until the company picks itself up and reorganizes again, the damage will already be done.
To prevent this, we recommend utilizing chatbot automations, which usually come with live chat software.
These chatbot automations can help improve digital customer experience by ensuring that customers are able to interact with your brand from the moment they enter your store, and even after they leave.
They can help customers find answers to simple questions on their own, and can help you and your team free up time to focus on high-value customers, on complex inquiries that require more of your time, or on other parts of your company that need your attention.
Most importantly, it ensures that customers will always receive service when dealing with your brand, even if it’s not always perfect.
5. Think “omnichannel” for the entire end-to-end customer journey
The word “digital” is no longer limited to the experiences that people have sitting in front of a desk top, browsing through a monitor.
People now have omnichannel access to the digital space on multiple devices, and are able to interact with businesses through various channels.
If you’re running an online business, it’s important to pay attention to the entire customer journey, through all of these channels, and ensure that the experience is consistent across all of them.
Many times, businesses miss important details in the customer journey, because they’re visibility is limited to specific channels that seem more obvious.
Every touchpoint (i.e. social media, chatbots, SMS, email, etc.) should be looked at with a fine-tooth comb to make sure your brand is being experienced in the same way across them all.
This ensures a seamless experience and a level of quality that your customers can rely on at all times.
Originally published at https://channel.io/en.
